Longreads

Dave Biro had a sound in his head, and it went sort of like this: Ahhhhh-AHHHHHH-Ahhhhhh He’d been listening nonstop to a new 8-track, Tales from Topographic Oceans; this was 1974, after all, when a…

In a middling funk last fall, searching for a little prose pick-me-up, I located my printout of Lee Tandy Schwartzman's Crippled Detectives, or The War of the Red Romer, a novella in 25…

The Awl’s Choire Sicha, Carrie Frye, Alex Balk: Our Top Longreads of 2011 (Left to right: Choire, Carrie, Alex) Because there are three of us, we trilaterally decided to go for 15. But…

Discussed: A Solid 60 Plymouth, The Pitiless Judgment of Youth, Dashboard Jukeboxes, Horn-Rims and Brylcreem, Optimistic Overestimation in Marketing Copy, That Damn Rock-and-Roll Noise, Purchases…

James Curtis was part of the first generation of reporters to work what we now think of as the crime beat. Of course, criminal proceedings had always held a fascination for readers: ever since the 1600s there’d been a roaring market in broadsheets that relished the details of a crime and a malefactor’s bloody end, usually with a crude accompanying woodcut showing them dangling from a gallows.

When we think of the birth of the conservation movement in the 19th century, the names that usually spring to mind are the likes of John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, men who wrote about the need to protect wilderness areas in an age when the notion of mankind's "manifest destiny" was all the rage. But a far less remembered American—a contemporary of Muir and Thoreau—can claim to be the person who first publicised the now largely unchallenged idea that humans can negatively influence the environment that supports them.